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Nalates Urriah

Second Life Viewer: Imprudence 1.2 Review

There is a new Imprudence Viewer out, version 1.2. Massively’s Tateru Nino has a write up about it. They have itemized the new features and improvements, so I’ll skip repeating that.

The viewer has a User Interface (UI) that is a bit different than other viewers. Expect to take some time to get used to it.

Imprudence has added chat with vertical tabs, which I love. This change puts the tabs on the left side rather than bottom of the chat dialog. You can see many more tabs. It makes it much easier to keep up with ongoing IM’s. They don’t get scrolled off so easily.

I have yet to use the new Imprudence Viewer. It sounds like they have added many of the features currently in Emerald Viewer and a few new twists.

Mini-Map

They have done more with Windlight (WL). They have included several prebuilt libraries of settings. They added a new tab on the bottom to allow easier changing of the WL settings. This should be handy for those taking pictures.

Reading threw the review at Massively I see several new ideas added by McCabe and the MeerKat Viewer team. Several bug fixes for better compatibility with OSGrid and others.

I’m downloading now. More later.

(Later) I got to use it a little bit last night. The mini-map has a built in AV radar. See the image. The right-click menu is open in the image. Hover over a dot to get the AV name.

With my duel core, 4gb ram, eVGA 8800 and graphics on high I was averaging 20 FPS. Other than the right-click pie menu changing I did not notice many differences in the UI. I’ll have to use the viewer more to see what else is there.

Update 12/2/09

I ran into extremely low FPS. The fast timers show the problem in the State of Sort, Post Sort, VBO Rebuild & Volume, Pools, Render Pools – 5,000+ms, Full Bright, Glow… The problems had me down to 0.1 FPS standing in a SIM named Out of Control, fitting. I tried turning off all of the graphics features I could. I only recovered to 1.7 FPS. A restart and I recovered. More to come.

I tried running the viewer on mid-range graphics settings. I was bouncing between 2 and 30 FPS. If I stood still until everything downloaded FPS would come back up. As soon as I started walking I would drop down to 2 or 3 FPS and bandwidth would only run around 250k… (I have cable, 6 mb average download speed).